The French Doll

I don’t know who she belonged to before she came into my possession more than sixty-five years ago, a gift from my father. She was already old then, but now her garments are more conspicuously stained and frayed. Her head is hanging by a thread, as it always did, her black hair glued close to her scalp, and on the back of her neck, engraved in tiny letters, is the single word “France.” Astute child that I was, this led me to conclude that she was French, and I called her Laverne, which was the most French-sounding name I could imagine. But sadly, in an era of Ginger dolls, Revlon dolls, baby dolls with “tiny tears”, and Barbie, the ultimate victor, fickle girls like me relegated dolls like Laverne to the realm of decor. I am sure I kept her propped up at my pillow for a while, but she never got the attention she deserved, and before long, she was confined to a closet, which at least is part of the house. Over time, the distance of her exile increased, and she became an inhabitant of the garage, a space for things that have no role in my life, or that evoke sad memories, but with which I cannot bear to really part.

Last week, however, Laverne found herself being transported via vintage train cosmetic case through the orchard and into the house. I had arranged a video visit with my best seven-year-old friend Virginia, and was hoping to inspire Virginia to do some writing. Random props and souvenirs in a train case sometimes worked to evoke stories and poems among students in my teaching days, so I brought the case and we opened it together. Along with Laverne, there was a compact of Pond’s “Angel Face” make-up, unused from the 1950s, an old train ticket from England, and various other items, none of which conveyed the hoped-for magic. The most compelling thing about the train case was not so much its contents as the delicious boinging click it made when unlatched. The blue satin lining seemed sad, the mirror showed only the face of a woman nearing seventy, and there was a decidedly tired and musty smell. My seven-year-old friend and I found other things to talk about.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about Laverne. I wondered what the old doll doctor in Paris could tell me about her, if he is still there. (Paris. Remember Paris? That was a place to which we traveled once, when traveling was a thing we did, in the World-Before-Corona.) Come to think of it, I wonder where Laverne was during the 1918 flu pandemic. She was surely on the scene then, and not new either, for she has the attributes of an emissary of the nineteenth century, maybe even early 1800s. Did some long-ago little girl once play with her? Was she the property of an ancestor of mine? How could I have failed to ask my father about her origins? I guess that’s the thing about being a child. It doesn’t seem necessary to ponder sources or costs or how such a treasure came to fall into one’s open hands. The world pours forth its riches, and we accept.

It’s strange that Laverne has reappeared in these quarantine days, although to be fair, in these quarantine days, everything is strange. But in some weird way, she represents a continuity in my life, an artifact that has survived, both familiar and mysterious. In her blank and enigmatic face, I read a message of stability, a calm kind of lastingness that is counter to the upheaval we are experiencing now, and it makes me feel a little less precarious. Oh, I know I’m making that up, using Laverne as some sort of icon, but she can be a symbol of whatever I choose to see in her, and she has stuck with me since childhood, harboring no grudges despite my abandonment of her. I perceive gentleness in her blue eyes, and I’m seeking reassurance, so I see it. Some things last.

“It’s hard to feel hopeful these days, isn’t it?” wrote a friend in an email this morning. God, yes. She lives in Los Angeles, and her car was recently stolen right out of her driveway, and she says that this event, along with doom-scrolling through the news about the rising Covid numbers, has made her skittish about getting together with anyone, but she’s come to the ranch and is hiding out here, trying to stay positive.

But she and I are poetry buddies, and she has attached a poem by Marianne Moore, which concludes with these lines:

  The very bird,

   grown taller as he sings, steels

his form straight up.  Though he is captive,

his mighty singing

says, satisfaction is a lowly

thing, how pure a thing is joy.

            This is mortality,

            this is eternity.

It’s a poem about the human condition, the defiant singing in the face of mortality. We are all in a kind of captivity now, but indeed we always were. This poem somehow accepts the cage and our own impermanence, and within those parameters nonetheless finds joy.

I’ve been trying to allow myself to feel that joy when it comes, trying not to make moments of laughter and bursts of song contingent upon knowing how this complex, interconnected cluster of crises will be resolved. And sometimes looking back is more steadying than trying to see ahead, for there are clues in our history about what might serve us now. The winds of change are lifting assorted fragments of memory and identity. Some will fly away, and others stick. I picture a woman in the distant future looking into a French doll’s impassive face, wondering whose hands once held her, and what stories she could tell.